Spooky 'UFO'

What started out as a casual sightseeing trip to a historic castle in the Netherlands took a bizarre turn for one Dutch woman, who claims she may have…Read More »

spotted some kind of UFO.

Corrine Federer, 43, a business manager and amateur photographer, was visiting medieval Muiderslot Castle outside Amsterdam last month when she started taking pictures using her camera's high-dynamic range, or HDR, feature.

Federer took dozens of photos that day, but it wasn't until sometime later that she reviewed her HDR photos and saw a startling airborne shape in some of the images.

Tiny see-through lobsters

Credit: Photo courtesy of the University of Miami’s Rosenstiel School of Marine & Atmospheric Science.

These teeny-tiny infant lobsters may be small, but their commercial value is anything but. Spiny-lobster (Panulirus argus) hauls in the Caribbean bring in $1 billion a year, which is why researchers are taking a closer look at these lobster babies.

A new computer simulation, published June 7 in the journal PLOS ONE, reveals how lobster larvae travel in their first five months to a year of life, before they mature into adults. The study reveals that the Caribbean current, once thought to be a spiny-lobster superhighway, is actually a problem for little lobsters: If the larvae spend lots of time among the sea's strong currents, they're likely to be "flushed out of the system," study researcher Mark Butler, of Old Dominion University in Virginia, said in a statement.

Black hole trove

Astronomers have discovered 26 new likely black holes in the neighboring Andromeda galaxy — the largest haul of black hole candidates ever found in a…Read More »

galaxy apart from our own.

Black holes, which emit almost no light themselves, can be seen only by the light given off by material falling into them. The supermassive black holes that populate the centers of most galaxies are easy to spot because their surroundings are so bright, but much smaller stellar mass black holes are considerably harder to find.

Darwin's frogs

Credit: doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0066957.g001

Some of nature's most fascinating fathers may be at risk of extinction.

Male Darwin's frogs swallow their offspring in the tadpole stage, incubate their young in their vocal sacs, and eventually spit out fully developed froglets. Along with seahorses, the frogs are thought to be the only known living vertebrates in which dads take on baby-carrying duties with special sacs that make them look pregnant.

Crazy dust storms

Credit: NOAA.

The Old West was an infamously dusty place, the grime a symbol of the gritty frontier. But the West may be even dustier today than it was in the past, thanks to a combination of factors that include droughts, land-use changes and more frequent windstorms, a new study suggests.

All that dust blowing around has implications both for the places that the dust comes from and the places that it lands, because "dust storms cause a large-scale reorganization of nutrients on the surface of the Earth," said study leader Janice Brahney, a doctoral student at the University of Colorado at Boulder when the research was done.

Cool variable stars

Credit: ESO

A previously unknown kind of variable star is on brilliant display 7,000 light-years from Earth in a new photo taken by a telescope in the Southern Hemisphere.

For years scientists have known that the apparent brightness of many stars changes over time, however, the kind of variable star seen in this new European Southern Observatory photo of the open star cluster NGC 3766 has not been studied in detail before.

Hungry penguins

Credit: Graham Harris/Wildlife Conservation Society

South American Magellanic penguins gobble down 1.5 million tons of silverside fish, squid and small, oily fish such as sprat every year. If all of the world's 1.3 million Magellanic penguins are as voracious as their Patagonian counterparts, then the black-and-white birds may be bolting down 2 million tons of seafood every year, according to a study published Dec. 12, 2012, in the journal PLOS ONE.

Smallest galaxy ever

Credit: Garrison-Kimmel, Bullock (UCI)

An ultra-faint collection of 1,000 stars orbiting the Milky Way is the most lightweight galaxy ever discovered, scientists say.

The dwarf galaxy known as Segue 2 is bound together by a tiny clump of dark matter. Scientists who measured it using Hawaii's Keck Observatory say the finding adds support to theories about the formation of the universe.

Snowflake, the albino gorilla

Credit: Photographic archive of the Barcelona Zoo.

A famous albino gorilla that lived for 40 years at the Barcelona Zoo got its white coloring by way of inbreeding, new research shows.

Snowflake was a male Western lowland gorilla. He was born in the wild and captured in 1966 by villagers in Equatorial Guinea. As the only known white gorilla in the world, Snowflake was a zoo celebrity until his death of skin cancer in 2003.

Agile cheetahs

Credit: Structure & Motion Lab, RVC.

Cheetahs may hold the distinction of being the fastest animals on land, but these elegant felines actually owe their hunting prowess to their ability to rapidly accelerate and maneuver around tight turns, a new study finds.

A team of researchers monitored five wild cheetahs in northern Botswana and found that despite clocking top speeds of nearly 60 mph (97 km/h), cheetahs use their agility — rather than simply relying on a furious pace — to track down prey.

Twilight zone

Credit: Christian Lindemann

Just as TV producer Rod Serling took his audiences to "a fifth dimension beyond that which is known to man … an area which we call the twilight zone," the royal research ship James Cookhas taken scientists to the North Atlantic to study the "twilight zone" of the ocean — a region between 100 and 1000 meters (330 to 3,300 feet) below the sea surface, where the sunlight that dapples the upper ocean reaches into the inky black depths.

The ship set sail from Glasgow, Scotland, on May 31, for the Porcupine Abyssal Plain 350 miles (560 kilometers) southwest of Ireland. During the two-week expedition, researchers will study how life in the upper ocean influences the transport of carbon from the atmosphere down to the deep ocean.

Bizarre oarfish found

Credit: Mark Benfield / Journal of Fish Biology

Behold the oarfish, a bizarre beast the lives in the deep ocean, far offshore. Due to its remote home, little is known about the fish, whose dorsal fins delicately undulate as it glides about the deep.

Much of what we know about the creature comes from specimens that have washed ashore or floated to the surface, but in the past few years, a number of videos of the fish have been captured and are shedding more light on the animal's shadowy existence.

Antarctic ice melt

Credit: Jim Elliott, British Antarctic Survey

When iceberg chunks break off of floating ice shelves, it can serve as dramatic proof of melting — and this traditionally has been considered the main way that these expanses of Antarctic ice become smaller. But new research reveals a disconcerting finding that is invisible to the naked eye: These ice shelves primarily melt from below.

Knowing what is driving ice-shelf melt is important because when ice shelves lose mass, they speed up the flow of land-bound glaciers that feed them, moving ice from the continent to the ocean, and contributing to global sea level rise.

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